The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) reported Tuesday in a statement that the Seattle-based company agreed to pay 134,523 dollares «to solve its possible civil liability for allegedly violations of multiple sanction programs.»
According to the statement, the alleged violations consist of having accepted and processed some requests on its websites for people located or employed by the embassies of Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, nations subject to OFAC´s unilateral sanctions.
The statement also set down that from November 15, 2011 to October 18, 2018, people in Crimea, Iran, and Syria ordered or made some business on Amazon´s websites.
Overall, the alleged violations were primarily some transactions involving low-value retail goods and services, for which the total amount of the transactions was about 269,000 dollars.
These violations happened primarily because Amazon’s automated sanction detection processes were unable to fully analyze all clients´ transactions and particulars to OFAC compliance.
It is not the first time that Amazon has been hit the effects of the hostile US policy against Cuba, since this tech company was one of the US companies hit by lawsuits under Title III of the controversial Helms-Burton Act.
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